


Corrosion

by Zagzagael



Category: True Detective
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-16
Updated: 2014-07-16
Packaged: 2018-02-09 03:48:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1967814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zagzagael/pseuds/Zagzagael
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Inspired by 2012 Rust's astonishing and deeply moving and problematic "Sin of Being a Father" musings - Rust reflects on how the birth of Sophia re-created her parents. How her random death destroyed them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Corrosion

The animal coupling, the release. His drunken devotion and human longing. Allowing her to swing the hammer against the anvil. The weapon she fashions, tempered with the tension and the heat they had purposefully generated between them, cuts it all away.

Dark green eyes, trick-of-the-light auburn hair. And perhaps that is why his body betrays him, to protect his heart. Keeping the two women separated by the thinnest of walls that make up the paper house he inhabits inside his mind. For him it had always been blue-eyed blondes. Will always be. The classic Westernized Madonna. Claire was all porcelain skin and sky-blue eyes. Sophia had hair so fine and white that her head was as though wreathed in a halo of light. 

 

The child. Their child. Named for the Goddess of Wisdom. He remembers the moment in which Claire finally acquiesced, agreed. It was not a relenting, more a realization, the recognition. It had been in the hospital, he knew that for a fact. The squalling girlchild quieting when he took her into the cradle of his own arms, gently pressing the small shell of her ear against his heartbeat, letting her listen to the ocean within him. Not knowing then that she would come to be the jagged rock upon which his sea would break. Claire had wanted to name their child, this fresh soul, something old-fashioned and botanic. It frightened him. The name with no precedent. He himself had been so named. 

He could feel the weight of the powerful name he had chosen in his mouth, wanting to gift her with substantial form. He looked down into the face of his daughter and thought of the Jewish mystic tradition. The ten-month long journey she had been asked to take, the place from which she had been beckoned. He could not believe how presuming and ignorant they had been, he and Claire, the contrast of the fragility of their all-too human existences and the frightening fortitude of the soul they had ushered into the world. He could not have been forewarned about the experience of birth, the newborn, the fierce play of evolution on his emotions. 

He needed to escape the sterility of the hospital, take the child and her mother out into the world, find a field of tall grass and stand in the middle of it, the earth below the sky above. The primitive awed male in him wanted to stake his claim for all the world to see, _mine mine mine._

He looked with narrowed eyes into the face of his newborn child. He saw her. And in that seeing, the mystery of her origin, the beginnings of his own journey were seeded, the one in which he himself would become a mystic. He tentatively touched the dimple in the bow of her upper lip - where the angel had pressed a finger and whispered, _forget_. 

Nameless and yet he knew her. Recognized her, the transparency and the reflection.

He insisted and in his way would brook no argument. Claire smiled and nodded, they both were mind blown. Sophia. And then the flower. Claire would take to calling her Sophie. For short. Called him Rustin for long.

He took these two female creatures home the next morning. Noticed his hands shaking on the steering wheel, wondered for how long he would be reduced to tremors by the experience of birth. He settled the three of them: the motherless child, the good mother, and the new life they had wrought. Over the ensuing days and weeks and months he was rendered speechless watching the petals of his wife unfold, bloom open. She became the rose. Her gentle mothering left him shaking from the inside out, had him, for the first time in his life, mourning the child he himself had been. 

He hadn’t known what creating a family out of nothingness would bring. He had not been able to imagine himself, his wife, their child outside of cultural platitudes. 

He had no way of knowing that the child would remake Claire, as though the building of a new life inside her body, the opening of her bones through which this life could pass, the heaviness of her breasts, the babe in her arms, tore Claire down to her foundations and rebuilt her and the change was awesome and fearsome and humbling.

Claire very simply never put the baby down. All the things they had been taught in their new baby care class were ignored. Sophia slept tucked up against her mother’s heartbeat in their bed, nursed on demand, was rocked in arms, carried outside un-swaddled beneath the morning sun, eyes closed skin thirsty for light and warmth and summertime. He remained silent, watching the transformation of the woman he thought he knew into the mother he certainly did not know but recognized as primal. The hands-on immersion acted teacher for him as well and the three of them became entangled in symbiotic nurturing. 

For Claire it was a blooming, for him it was a withering. The humility and the fear. He had never feared anything before Sophia, after her birth he became paranoid and frantic. A hysterical existentialist. Her dying stripped the fear from off his bones, flayed him. There was no one left to worry about, and his pessimism bloomed, the corpse flower.

Two days after Sophia’s death, in the darkest part of the night, he roused himself from a grief stupor to the sound of strangled sobbing and found Claire in the shower, stripping her aching breasts of milk. She had been nursing their living child to sleep; the dead child had left her engorged. Shame drenched him. He took her into his arms - later he would remember this as the last gentle embrace - elbowed off the faucet and pressed his shoulders hard against the tiled wall, sliding down to an awkward seat on the wet floor. He held her in his lap and rocked her against him for hours and hours, in and out of sleep, in and out of dreams, in and out of his limbs going numb and needle-tingling back to life. The boneless soaking wet weight of her an accusation. 

The realization that there would never be relief hit him then, watching the night-blackened window turn grey then pink. He knew that the ocean of tears inside him, inside her, was a vast limitless universal sea. He let himself slip under, descend into the blackness. 

She was destroyed by death, by loss, by grief. She was drowning. One morning he woke to find himself washed ashore, crawling up the rocky sandy beach alone, and he pulled himself to his feet and walked away. Never looking back. The tides ripped him from her.

 

The secret mortification that encumbers him, the hair shirt he wears, the cilices he tightens around the meaty part of his thighs each morning, is not the death of his child. He is penitent for the trespass of a God who would break a mother on the wheel of her child’s death. He may have been saved the sin of being a father, but for reasons the mind cannot fathom, the woman he loved, the woman he helped fashion a life from with just the cellular structure of their bodies, is destroyed by a death that neither one of them could have foreseen or prevented or thrown themselves in front of. Time, he decides, is the cruelest overlord and the clock hands inside his mind useless. He cannot go back, he cannot stop, he can only be carried forward. 

He knows he could see her life in a few taps of the keyboard. Had she remarried, borne more children? Or was she sitting on a rickety pier somewhere on the coast of Florida, chain-smoking menthols, a stiff cocktail in one hand, a drawn curtain inside her mind, a missing beat in her heart? He decided he didn’t want to know. 

 

Once, in the car, he said to Marty, “Did you know that at one time Tongan women would smash out their front teeth with rocks the size of your fist? In mourning? Grief made physical.”

This was the second day of the Millenium. He had unloosed his secrets and his thoughts on his partner as though exotic parasites of which there could be no ridding. Brain worms. Infecting the both of them. 

 

He sacrifices his emotional life as payment. For her loss, for his abandonment of hope. Stripped naked he finds himself on his knees in the Garden. Contemplating the proffered wine. He becomes the Patron Saint of Progenitors. Patron Saint of Murdered Children. Isn’t an accident just a fatalistic murder, he asks. Weary pietist who cannot protect fathers of the dead. Martyred without his consent, he endures the tortures of a capricious god only to find himself, in the end, staggering to his feet, wings bursting out his back, avenging angel.


End file.
